Conquering 6 workforce planning challenges with Anaplan

Conquering 6 workforce planning challenges with AnaplanWhy workforce planning and optimization initiatives can’t be put off any longer

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Enterprise workforce planning: 5 reasons why it matters Your workforce is likely your most expensive asset—and yet an investment in a workforce planning

platform isn’t usually a top priority for executives. But did you know that companies tackling their

workforce planning and optimization with Anaplan are saving 2–5 percent on their payroll costs?

Let’s dive into workforce planning and why it matters. In a recent webinar poll, Anaplan asked what

was the main reason why workforce planning matters to your organization.

Although answers were dispersed, we found that over 40 percent agree that workforce planning

matters most because of the cost of the workforce on the overall business. This is a true concern for

organizations: The fact is, if your workforce strategy and headcount planning aren’t as efficient and

effective as possible, there can be a huge loss in cost and cycle times due to turnover or resources

wasted because of incorrect allocation of headcount.

In a recent survey, companies ranked their satisfaction with existing workforce planning tools as 2.8 out of 5. They ranked the importance of analytical capabilities for workforce planning as 4.6 out of 5.

Source: Society for Human Resources Management

Source: Crunchflow. “Global Workforce Planning

Survey.” Published August 2016.

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With 41 percent of HR leaders polled claiming workforce planning matters most due to the cost of the workforce, efficient hiring and payroll processes are clearly needed.

The diversity of the benefits or impacts highlighted in the poll explain why workforce planning is so

important—it touches and can impact everything from collaboration (internally) to customer experience

(externally). This shifting mindset implies that HR professionals are seeing their responsibilities broaden

across the organization to more directly impact both the top and bottom line. In order to measure

workforce planning against the broader business and market dynamic, leading HR organizations are

investing in workforce planning, optimizing their hourly workforce, and people analytics. This depth of

insight into the workforce can not only decrease turnover and increase employee engagement, but can

also cut costs and help managers better act on previously unseen opportunities to impact business results.

In this white paper, we discuss how you can transform you HR processes with Anaplan to meet these

growing workforce planning expectations. We identify six challenges you can conquer when investing in

workforce planning platform, including:

1. Gaining a true picture of your workforce capacity and current headcount

2. Modeling and predicting attrition

3. Forecasting workforce demand accurately

4. Preparing a workforce gap analysis down to the role

5. Testing the impact of significant workforce changes

6. Creating a data-driven hiring plan

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6 workforce challenges you can conquer with AnaplanWhether you are using dispersed HRMS systems comprised of point solutions, a legacy planning

system, spreadsheets, or a mix of the three, you are likely quite familiar with the headaches of

consolidating data and departmental hiring planning to gain a accurate picture on the health

of your workforce.

With Anaplan, you gain a real-time pulse on your workforce by aggregating data and a single

view across recruiting, onboarding, headcount costs, compensation, and succession planning

to ensure your planning and resourcing strategies are most effective. In this section, we will

discuss six of the most common workforce planning challenges we see with our customers

and lay out how you can conquer these challenges to optimize your workforce using Anaplan.

“There has been a seismic shift in the war for talent. Those that don’t understand that shift and change their approach to talent management are going to fall into a newly opened crevasse from which they may never escape.”- George Bradt, Forbes.com

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01 Gain a true picture of your workforce capacity and current headcountAt first glance, a dashboard that gives you an up-to-date picture of your key workforce dimensions may

not seem like a big deal. But anyone who has tried to produce such a view without a solution like Anaplan

will readily agree that it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

The reason why capturing a picture of the current state of your workforce is so difficult is due to the

dynamic nature of your data—what your organization looks like today is different than what it will look

like tomorrow. People will leave, new people will get hired, some others may be termed, roles will change,

etc. If you try to manage this in Excel®, the data will be out-of-date by the time you finish your analysis,

if not before.

The solution to this challenge is to have the data from supporting systems integrated into your model in

order to get automatic daily updates. A common question is: “Can’t I get all of this from my HRMS system?”

The answer is: You can get some of it. Many of your basic employee dimensions will be in your HRMS, as

well as employee movement data. However, there is much more that needs to be considered—such as

financial information and contractor/contingent labor, for example—but if those aren’t in your HRMS, then

you won’t have a complete picture nor will you be able to develop a workforce planning model. For many

HR practitioners, having a near real-time view of their key workforce headcount KPIs is a big advantage

and the starting point for more advanced workforce planning.

In Anaplan: When it comes to determining your workforce capacity, there are a couple of ways that having

an Anaplan model can assist. If your employee population is primarily exempt workers (i.e., salaried), then

capacity can be calculated at the headcount level (pulled from HRMS), by role or employee, with expected

attrition deducted to come up with a net capacity headcount number. You may choose to attach some

form of productivity standard to convert headcount into a related business driver, such as determining

how many IT systems your organization can support. Either way, being able to model this in Anaplan is

incredibly powerful.

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For non-exempt employee populations, you will want to get more precise on capacity, meaning the

calculation should not be rounded and you take it to at least one decimal point. Why does this matter?

Because minutes matter when it comes to large employee populations and when you are talking about

customer service and labor costs. Fortunately, with Anaplan, you can net out all non-productive workforce

capacity by modeling historical data. The resulting KPI is productive full-time equivalents (PFTE), and it is

an integral component of the ultimate workforce demand and supply gap analysis.

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02 Model and predict attritionPerhaps no other topic in HR analytics has received as much attention recently as attrition. The increasing

popularity of big data and predictive analytics has given rise to the question: “Can we predict which

employees will perform best or leave the company soon?” Successfully answering these questions can

prove to be very valuable.

There are two fundamental ways to look at attrition: looking back and looking forward. A basic model of

attrition looking back should consider, at the minimum, turnover by month and whether it is voluntary

or involuntary. If voluntary, then determine whether it is regretted or not regretted. This data can be

incorporated into a workforce planning model simply as a monthly average to get a sense of the impact

on headcount.

In Anaplan: With Anaplan’s powerful modeling capabilities and pre-built algorithms, you can do much

more. First, it should be noted that there is no substitute for ample historical data if you wish to predict

Customer success story: Tableau

“The scope of our headcount can be a complicated matter. Every department plans headcount differently and on a different cadence. So each planning team really needs to own their own data. We want people to self-serve with their data, and Anaplan allows us to really edit our data.”

Erin Hoff, Business Analyst, Tableau

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attrition (or anything else for that matter). The more variables you have related to employees, the more

likely you will be able to correlate something to attrition. For example, you could capture and model the

following items: source of hire, candidate test scores, length of commute, who is the manager, the team,

and so on. Not all will prove to be relevant but you won’t know until you test them.

This is where Anaplan comes in. Once you have your data in Anaplan, you can apply and test up to 15

different algorithms against your data set and rank the results based on mean absolute percent error (MAPE).

For example one customer leveraged this functionality to model their attrition as part of an overall workforce

plan using Anaplan. Not only does the system make it easy to see which is the best-fit algorithm, it also

allows a seasoned forecaster to override the different parameters if they wish to adjust the calculations

based on other knowledge they may have about the data.

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03 Accurately forecast workforce demandAn accurate workforce plan is ultimately a factor of accuracy for both the demand and supply of labor for

your organization. We discussed supply and capacity above but how do you determine demand? First,

you need to figure out what the appropriate driver(s) is/are for your labor requirements. For example, in

a contact center, it is the number of calls, chats, and emails. In a retail store environment, it is sales and

customer traffic. In a sales organization, it may be the number of accounts, population, geography, or

the ratio of account reps to sales support personnel.

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Those are easy examples, but how do you accurately calculate workload for the IT organization? One

Anaplan customer is doing this by applying a workload factor to each internal system supported by IT.

This is a simple but effective way to begin assessing capacity within departments where you may not

normally have clear workload drivers.

In Anaplan: Regardless of what drives demand for your labor, the most important point is to ensure the

uniqueness of your different departments or business units is respected. This is where Anaplan’s flexibility

is key because one model can accommodate whichever drivers are required to most accurately calculate

demand for your workforce. For most enterprises, the full workforce plan will encompass numerous business

units or departments, with variables that drive how much labor is required. Anaplan allows you to pull the

labor driver data—such as shipment data that will determine the workload in a warehouse—associate it

with a set of labor standards (e.g., minutes to unload a truck), and precisely calculate the optimal amount

of work minutes required for a day or part of a day.

What about other parts of the organization? In the same model, you could use, for example, sales to drive

how much labor is required in a retail store. You could also use the number, type, and size of your project

and optimal skills mix when looking at project-based work, like you’ll find in IT support or your professional

services team. The flexibility of Anaplan means parts of the organization with different behaviors regarding

labor use can all be included in the same model.

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04 Prepare a workforce gap analysis down to the roleThe workforce gap analysis shows the delta between your forecasted workforce supply and demand, as

far as 24–36 months in advance. For most planners, this is the actionable data they have been waiting for

because it will trigger a whole new set of activities for their workforce, such as recruiting, hiring, training,

transferring, downsizing, and outsourcing over time—the list goes on.

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Given the dynamic nature of your workforce, it is best to think of the gap analysis as a rolling process

where you are constantly reassessing assumptions and future needs as opposed to a singular period or

point in time. Because of the monumental effort required to create a gap analysis using legacy methods

like spreadsheets, it is practically impossible to keep a model current.

In Anaplan: With a platform like Anaplan, you can take advantage of automatic data integration as demand

and supply numbers change. The accuracy of such a model helped one customer using Anaplan to exceed

their goals on reducing labor cost. What they anticipated being a 2–3 percent reduction turned out to be

closer to 5 percent, translating into more than $5 million in hard dollar savings.

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05 Test the impact of significant workforce changesOnce your workforce planning model can produce a gap analysis, you can leverage this great data to

perform powerful “what-if” analyses—a hallmark of any Anaplan-based solution. For example, you can

test what would happen if you changed any key workforce dimension or assumption and gauge the

impact on labor costs, such as: “What would happen if we closed an office in Boston and relocated the

affected employees to Raleigh?” Normally, such an analysis could take days to weeks of data gathering

and manipulation via spreadsheets to get some semblance of an answer.

Customer success story: TELUS

“We outgrew our previous long- and short-range workforce planning system—and chose Anaplan to be the platform for our transformational initiative to improve service delivery and support.”

Petto Chan, Manager Business Analysis, TELUS

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In Anaplan: With Anaplan, we can run such a model instantaneously and with data that is virtually real

time. This is the power of an enterprise-class modeling platform: It unlocks the value of your data that

has gone dark in silos.

Another common analysis is testing the impact of altering an organization’s full-time, part-time, and

contractor workforce mix. With a proper model, you can not only see how such changes affect costs but

also factor in productivity, quality, and ramp-up time to obtain a complete picture of the costs/benefits

of significant workforce changes.

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06 Creating a data-driven hiring planThe benefits of integrated workforce planning—where finance, HR, and other business unit leaders all

share “one version of the truth” in terms of data—become most evident when the hiring and recruiting

plans are developed. In non-Anaplan solutions (and most notably in spreadsheets), this is where confusion

reigns because unless you have direct links from your workforce gap analysis to your approved hiring

plan, and to specific headcount plans for recruiters, it quickly becomes a difficult task to keep all parties

aligned and clear on who needs to be recruited/hired, and when.

In Anaplan: With Anaplan, not only can you precisely model when you will need someone to be on the

job, but you can roll that back and factor in the time it takes for the hiring cycle to be fulfilled. This gives

recruiters a better sense of when they need to cast the net for particular roles or skills.

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Further, as you hone your process and measure the ratios of initial applicants to screenings, to interviews,

and ultimately, to hire decisions, you can feed that information back into your model and calculate the

volume of applicants you will need to fulfill a recruiting service level agreement. These are just a few of

the areas where you can make significant recruiting-hiring process improvements when you leverage

Anaplan. Once you start measuring and modeling these tasks, the productivity gains will reduce the cost

of hiring, improve the candidate engagement experience, and increase the cadence with which you attain

the best talent.

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The state of workforce planning: What’s neededSo far, we have highlighted steps to conquer your workforce planning challenges:

• First, gain a true picture of your current headcount and workforce skills capacity

• Next, model and predict attrition and forecast workforce demand more accurately to

identify skills gaps down to the role or employee level

• Then, test the impact of significant workforce changes in order to create a data-driven

hiring plan

Organizations today are increasingly building and managing a dynamic network of teams.

Managers need to be able to build a team, add and subtract team members, and dissemble a

team when a project ends. You need to have the right information, freshly updated and available

at any time, to make optimal decisions about your team. Regardless of team level—team-level,

department-level, business unit- level, c-level—the concepts are the same.

Despite this trend, we still have silos of data today. Recruiting systems are separate from

talent management systems, which are separate from learning management systems and the

succession plans in a spreadsheet. These data sources are either current or backward-looking,

and they are not aligned with one another. But what if you could bring all of these disparate

point solutions and spreadsheets together?

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Smart planning for your workforceAnaplan aligns your business plans with your people plans, bringing together needed information

from your recruiting system, learning management system, talent management system for your

hourly worker (a.k.a. workforce management system), and your HRMS to address the needs

of your team at the team-, department-, business- unit or c-level to have everything in place

needed to optimize the performance of the team. Anaplan models your ideas and the impact

they could have across the business, all in one platform.

Anaplan’s workforce planning capabilities help you identify skills gaps and adapt your plans by

allowing you to run unlimited “what-if” scenarios. Once a plan is vetted and approved, Anaplan

helps you track the effectiveness of people plans and programs for each component of the

employee life cycle, and course-correct as needed.

Companies choose Anaplan to address the gap between their workforce planning needs and

capabilities of their current solutions, while solving for a number of key talent issues: attracting

and retaining key talent amid changing workforce demographics, planning for global expansion,

uneven business performance, product or service innovations, and the mobility of talent.

With Anaplan, HR and operations leaders are seeing faster data consolidation time for improved

accuracy as a source of truth. This results in HR having more time to spend collaborating with

their business partners and enabling collaborative scenario planning, with real-time insight

into the impact to the business and workforce.

Organizations have greatly enhanced their planning experience, driving alignment between

the workforce and the business. They are able to share real-time insights that drive action for

timely and relevant results, benefiting from a planning platform that—because it is owned by

the business—is continuously adjusted to the realities and pace of business, in any department

and for any industry.

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How to make an impact on your workforce plan—starting todayIt’s hard to know where to get started, especially when trying to figure out which change or shift will make the greatest

impact on the business and bottom line. We have created a quick checklist to keep in mind as you dive into how best

to optimize your workforce planning strategy.

• Get ahead of trends and outliers. Look at metrics for performance, attrition, diversity, and pay gaps, both against market salary bands and internally for anticipated legislation addressing equal pay for equal work.

Connect disparate systems and different departments.

Optimize labor costs. Sharpen efforts and timing to find the best talent.

Turn deep data sets into powerful models of the organization from a workforce perspective.

• Are you able to automate the loading in of data from each of your workforce data sources?

• Anaplan offers a number of integration options for integrating data:

• Simple

• Self-service GUI: Point and click file import and export via Anaplan user interface

• Automated

• Anaplan Connect: On-premise bidirectional utility. Compatible with any scheduling tool. Simple and advanced file-based integration.

• Anaplan ETL Connectors: Use predefined bidirectional Anaplan connectors available with Informatica, MuleSoft, SnapLogic and Boomi ETL tools to connect to SaaS applications or ERP solutions like SAP and Oracle

• Native Connectors: Import standard or custom objects (i.e., Salesforce.com)

• Programmatic

• REST API: Custom bidirectional integration with applications or any ETL tool

• Are you hitting your service level agreements or goals?

• Can you benchmark performance across teams? With this information, you can find the positive outliers and drill down on the “why’s,” then roll out to other teams.

• Do you have an accurate picture of your current skills capacity?

• Can you easily course-correct your demand for labor forecasts by role as business conditions change?

• Do you have a built-in approvals process for vetting and prioritizing your hire list?

• Can you identify potential bottlenecks to deliver on your recruiting plans?

• Can you measure recruiting velocity and scenario plan alternatives to improve the time from opening a requisition to on-boarding your new hire?

• Do you have the right package of salary and benefits, both monetary and non-monetary?

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Take a WorkforceIQ AssessmentAs a leader in workforce optimization, Workforce Insight can help shed light on where improvement

in your workforce can be made regardless of your maturity stage.

Complete a WorkforceIQ Assessment to learn where you can most benefit from changes in

your workforce planning strategy. WorkforceIQ™ provides a structured diagnostic assessment to

help you identify your level of workforce management maturity and effectiveness—and prioritize

the highest-impact opportunities for labor cost savings, productivity improvement, improved

customer satisfaction, and employee engagement

Learn more about Anaplan workforce planning and optimization apps available on the App Hub.

And lastly, learn about Anaplan’s approach to ensuring your successful deployment of Anaplan.

For companies considering Anaplan:

Conduct a rapid proof-of-concept to discover how

easily you can load and consolidate data in Anaplan,

reconciling any discrepancies between data sources.

Replicate current models you may have in spreadsheets

or download any one of our workforce planning or

workforce optimization apps from the Anaplan App

Hub, accelerating your model building with a best-

practices template that can be easily configured.

For existing Anaplan customers:

Do a pilot project to start your enterprise workforce

planning or workforce optimization model to

learn how Anaplan model building competencies

established by other departments in your organization

can be transferred over to your own.

See how easily you can load and consolidate data in

Anaplan, including from your other Anaplan models.

Replicate current models you may have in spreadsheets

or download any one of our workforce planning or

workforce optimization apps from the Anaplan App

Hub, accelerating your model building with a best-

practices template that can be easily configured.

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About Anaplan About Workforce Insight

Anaplan is the leading planning and performance management

platform for smart businesses. Anaplan combines an unrivaled

planning and modeling engine, predictive analytics, and cloud

collaboration into one simple interface for business users. Anaplan

is a privately held company based in San Francisco with 16 offices

worldwide. To learn more, visit anaplan.com. Follow us on: Twitter,

LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.

Workforce Insight is the world’s leading workforce management and

analytics firm. Workforce Insight operates each day with a purpose:

To provide outcome-based, workforce management consulting,

analytics and support for our clients, generating significant labor cost

savings and sustainable performance gains. Our clients, including

48 of the Fortune 500, span key industries including Healthcare,

Manufacturing, Consumer Services (Retail, Hospitality, Gaming),

Business Services (Financial Services, Professional Services and Public

Sector). With unmatched expertise across all workforce management

and analytics platforms, rich industry depth and experience in more

than 30 countries, Workforce Insight is the leading and most trusted

workforce advisory firm.